Halloween Bingo 2023
I really appreciate Barbara Hambly's approach to vampire characters. So many authors treat them just as regular people with certain advantages and restrictions, but Hambly's vamps are much creepier. They truly have left their humanity behind. During the course of the novel, we learn that these vampires don't just need blood to stay at full power, they actually are fuelled by the death of their victim. This makes coexistence much more difficult.
James Asher may be an old hand at the spy game, but his wife, Lydia, is not. In fact, James had quit the Great Game, but feelings of guilt pull him back in at this point. It's difficult to tell the people in charge about vampires, after all. They tend to think that your cheese has slipped off your cracker. Plus, the vamps are all tetchy about a living human knowing about their existence. But Lydia knows of them too and when James hares off across Europe, cabling her about his destination, and she realizes that he is headed toward a probable double agent, she does a brave thing. She figures out where Don Simon Ysidro makes his home and waits there for him to arise for the night. If James was reluctant to work with this vampire, Ysidro is also an unwilling partner to Lydia. In fact, when they part, she is sure that she is on her own when she boards a train for Vienna. So it is a bit of a surprise when one of Ysido's human servants shows up to act as her traveling companion. When dusk arrives, Ysidro himself shows up.
Hambly gives Ysidro characteristics unlike the vampiric qualities she has set up in her fiction. When Lydia is at his home/lair, she witnesses him feeding his cats. He maintains an agreement to not kill anyone while traveling with her. He seems to put up with a lot of physical contact with his servant, Margaret, although Lydia knows that he dislikes being touched. A number of times, she notices genuine amusement in his eyes as they discuss their situation.
There is a fair amount of action, interspersed with travel time and time spent researching to discover the whereabouts of vampires in Istanbul, their eventual destination. The threats to James, Lydia, and even to Ysidro all feel very authentic, but I knew there are more books in the series, giving me the luxury of knowing that everyone would survive to have further adventures.
I read this book to match The Carpathians on my bingo card.
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